It’s a reasonable assumption to make that even some of the best horror films lose a little of their luster after the third or fourth viewing. Don’t get me wrong, the classics are just that – classics, but nothing can replicate the chills, the unsettling first-time frights or the rush of adrenaline that you get when experiencing those movies for the very first time.
As much as their silver-screen counterparts, horror efforts in the gaming realm can also too, find themselves similarly afflicted in this way, with the numerous jump scares and gore stuffed cut-cutscenes ascribing to the law of diminishing returns with every subsequent viewing. After all, there are only so many times you can take the head of the Baker family crashing through the walls at you in Resident Evil 7 before you kinda get a little numb to it all.
For me that’s quite a lot – for others, however, your mileage may vary.
Enter then The Persistence, a sterling first-person shooter effort for PSVR from British developer Firesprite, the game aims to disrupt the status quo a bit more than its contemporaries seem willing to. As the clone of a security officer on a ship that finds itself generously stuffed with a number of Event Horizon 2.0 style aberrations to avoid, the emphasis in The Persistence is very much on stealth and by proxy, not getting pounded into a fine red mist by said monstrosities.
Where The Persistence meaningfully differs itself from its genre peers, however, is in how it leverages procedural generation to keep its level layouts fresh. Every time you start a new playthrough, the ship’s structure rearranges its numerous deck modules into a random configuration which in turn has a direct impact on how to approach each attempt at the game.
Open plan areas in a previous playthrough that may have permitted wide creative latitude for concealment might well find themselves replaced by tighter affairs, where such opportunities for stealth are limited. Likewise, the numerous monsters that you’ll encounter throughout the ship also find themselves similarly shuffled around the place too – where there could have been a trivial foe on a previous playthrough, might now be supplanted by an indomitable enemy that completely changes your tactics and approach to the situation at hand.
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By embracing such mercurial design principles, The Persistence keeps not just the challenge fresh but the fear and the horror unfaded too – a miracle of sorts that more developers in this genre space should take notice of going forward. In The Persistence, every corner potentially holds some fresh terror, while the comforts of previously discovered safe areas to retreat to no longer exist.
With each playthrough the terror is reimagined anew and so too with it does that familiar fraying of the nerves and the pumping of adrenaline emerge start once again. Exacerbating the effect further is the fact that The Persistence is played out entirely within the realms of VR, meaning that each and every fright and pointedly, the anticipation of them, is far more keenly affecting than your underwear might like them to be.
In essence, procedural generation would seem to be a robust and evocative way to ensure that games which trade on horror, terror and fearful thrills can continue to do so for far longer than they would be otherwise able to. Tantalizingly, if one were to expand the concept beyond the boundaries of The Persistence, an already superbly judged hybrid of Dead Space and Alien Isolation, the mind boggles at how other entries in the genre might well benefit from the inclusion of such design.
Certainly, a version of the previously mentioned Alien Isolation which might include procedurally generated content would be a grandly pant-filling affair – albeit one that wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense when viewed within that game’s rigid narrative framework. Equally though, a Resident Evil title in the style of Resident Evil 7 with shifting map layouts and randomized enemy design could also succeed as well.
Like that force thing from Star Wars, however, there must be balance. While procedural generation is great at randomizing level design, monster types, locations and so on, overdoing it can result in a deeply impersonal experience. Worse still, this results in the realization that the game isn’t properly catering for the player or their feelings, which when you’re dealing with notions of horror and terror that literally feed off your own personal experience, is really quite the opposite of what you want as a player and a narrative participant.
In The Persistence, however, this is the never the case simply because its procedural design beats operate within a very well defined set of deftly considered parameters, ensuring that the constant sense of unease and the spectacle of its unrelenting terror are never diminished.
So yeah, more of this please developers.
